Motivation and emotion are key components of collaborative learning. However, there is lack of empirical studies on socio-emotional aspects in collaborative learning.
The aim of this study was to explore different types of emotion expressions in collaborative learning and the ways (verbal and nonverbal) students expressed their emotions. The participants of this study were 2 groups of first-year teacher education students from Oulu University in 2015. This study used video data which was collected from mathematics didactics course. The course took place in a classroom-like research space with 360 degree cameras and individual microphones for each participant. Altogether, there were 11 videos in total. The data was analyzed with Nvivo software to code 21 different types of emotions and verbal and nonverbal ways that students used to express their emotions.
The results showed that the students expressed 21 different types of negative and positive emotions during their collaborative learning. The main types of emotion expressions in collaborative learning of this study were calmness, happiness, boredom, and tiredness. Furthermore, it was found that confusion was expressed more often with verbal expression while calmness was expressed more often with nonverbal expression.
These findings implicate that future research can focus on how to help students to foster activated positive emotions to make collaborative learning more effective. Another interesting topic is to investigate the function of different types of emotions in collaborative learning. Besides, these findings have the potential to help teachers to design a better face-to-face collaborative learning course or computer supported collaborative learning course.